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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, APRIL 1, 1983
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the secular world they have been overcome by it (Ezekiel 22:26, 28}. The
President, in a secular office, can do little when the clergy does not show
the people the right way, and instead propagates a "social gospel" little
distinguished from platforms of political action.
If the secular guides can't take the "sermonizing" of Mr. Reagan, they
certainly are outraged at the hell-fire and brimstone thunderings of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
He, like President Reagan, clearly sees the
convergent parallel of godless atheism without and godless secularism
within. Here is a report, received March 2, 1983 over our Associated Press
news wire, concerning views of the Russian literary giant expelled to the
West eight years ago.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose rugged faith was honed in an op
pressive, officially atheist atmosphere and who� anti-reli
gious trends in the United States, has been chosen for the 1983
Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Now living and writing in Cavendish, Vermont, Solzhenitsyn has
rankled some American intellectuals by charging that the West is
falling victim to the same basic disease that has poisoned the
Soviet system. He calls that sickness "humanistic autonomy" or
"anthropocentricity
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the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of
man from any higher force above him.
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The attitude does not
admit the "intrinsic evil in man" and sees no higher task than
earthly happiness, he said, putting Western civilization "on the
dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs."
The world "has reached.! major watershed in history, equal in im
portance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance," he
says. "It will demand from us a spiritual blaze."
He says that trampling of spiritual-moral realities has occurred
in different ways both in the anti-religious materialism of
totalitarian Eastern Europe and in the West's commercial
materialism and divorce from religious values. At first glance
this seems an ugly parallel, he says. "But such is the logic of
materialistic development."
Solzhenitsyn, who has lived most of his 64 years under Soviet
communism, 13 of them in labor camps or Siberia for his criticism
of the Soviet system, says its atheist dictatorship is "a level
ling of mankind unto death." Expelled to the West eight years
ago••• , he sees similar corrosive trends at work in America. He
summed them up in a 1978 Harvard University address as an "eroded
humanism" cut off from religious roots.
That is the present
stance of the West--"the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of!!!.!!!
from any higher force above him," he said.
While the Renaissance threw off the shackles of the Middle Ages,
which repressed man's physical nature in favor of spiritual as
pects, he said that revolt from the spirit has now gone to the
other extreme of sheer materialism.
It has pointed western
civilization toward "worshipping man and his material needs,"
while spiritual values are blanked out "as if human life did not
have any higher meaning," Solzhenitsyn said.